


Chambord

by technosagery



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-16
Updated: 2011-06-16
Packaged: 2017-10-20 11:22:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/technosagery/pseuds/technosagery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series and pilot. Contradictions make a mystery and Will has time, and need, to follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chambord

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a character study to play with Will's voice and his eye for detail. It ended up a story I felt I had to tell about how Magnus fits an important pattern for Will, and fills an essential need. Thanks to Cerie for handholding and Kageygirl for detail eye. <3

A gust of late October wind up Euclid carries the promise of snow: the velvety tang of woodsmoke, crisp cold and not-quite-imagined spicing of mulled cider. It's one of the things he loves about Cleveland; yeah, the Mistake on the Lake and the city where the river burned, but he loves it anyway for the great running trails in the Emerald Necklace, never winning the pennant but always believing the Indians might turn it around this year, cannoli made the old country way in Coventry, and the museums. This time of year, he loves the smell of the Western Reserve always on the wind, even beneath the copious exhaust and acrid pinch of wet newsprint.

Across the block, a woman steps through the doors of the Clinic wearing a navy peacoat. Despite the puffy eyes of the grieving, she smiles when the wind sticks a half-copper maple leaf in her dark chestnut curls. She hugs herself and inhales tomorrow's snow. That's something else he loves about the east side. People here haven't forgotten the joys of winter. At least until the lake-effect blizzards settle in, snow means kids laughing around the edges of their bright red toboggans and cold hands warmed on hot cocoa. The woman, maybe ten years his senior, covers her crying eyes with almond-shaped tortoise shell sunglasses, pulls on dark raspberry knit gloves, and delights him into a quirk of a smile with a matching [raspberry beret](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cN53tKjIeYg/Swbuo4-LW8I/AAAAAAAAAao/cq4qg5UWd6o/s1600/raspberry+beret.jpg).

She's a mystery and Will's off-rotation for forty-eight hours, so he follows her.

* * *

 

It's farther than Will planned to go after a three-day onco-psych rotation, but the snow on the wind and a riot of chestnut curls under a raspberry beret are reason enough to keep walking. Not incongruous details, nothing glaring about the color choice or walking on a day like today, but on a day like today, after too many haunted eyes and stories of lives unlived, they are significant. Significant, vibrant details, and if Will doesn't run the bases anymore, he still runs. Even this long walk up Euclid barely stretches his legs.

She stops eventually, outside 2175 Cornell Road, and wraps her arms around herself again. In the polished window glass, Will sees her teeth set in a trembling lower lip that she's glossed in a deep berry pink on her way here. It looks to him like she's gathering her nerve and the part of him that went into psych for healing instead of forensics almost prompts him out of lurking to tell her he's sure she can do it. It wouldn't be a lie. In the past twenty minutes, he's observed a lot about her from how she moves and interacts with things and people as she passes. Will's 100% certain this woman can do anything she wants to do.

Before _he_ can gather the nerve to reveal his stalker-like tendencies, she squares her shoulders, tugs straight the sleeves of her coat and opens the door to Club Isabella, University Circle's worst-kept secret for late lunches, later dinners, and intimate jazz. Like every resident, Will knows the place. Advisors favor it for lunch meetings that impress the privileges of wealth a medical practice afford. Unlike most, he's never come on his own, pretending to those privileges. After growing up mostly in foster care, spending unnecessary money on food or clothes grates; besides, he figures it's better not to get used to something a government dick's never going to have.

On the other hand, not spending money means he has enough to follow her in without looking like the stalker he is. He's still wearing his scrub shirt, so he won't even be out of place. At least, that's what he tells himself when his hand closes around the gunmetal gray, hammered steel handle - just another resident, treating himself after thankless hours of shit (sometimes literally) work.

Through the door wafts a heavy lace of garlic, the smooth warmth of real butter, a sharp bite of pepper, exotic but earthy saffron, a heady, unexpected pinch of cumin. In ten years, they'll call it fusion; now, it's still 'Mediterranean'. At the woman’s shoulder, where she stands talking to someone who isn't the maître d’ beckoning him to a table, old, exposed brick grabs at the wool of her jacket - there'll be fiber transfer later - and snares a curl that Will itches to untangle. Stained, dark oak floors greet the nervous tap of her foot. She's got the beret in her gloved fingers, but she doesn't twist or wring it, and the hair at the crown of her head has been roughly smoothed.

He should leave, he thinks. He's intruding on something. But he can't quite break away. Like the monster that killed his mother, Will can't unsee her tears.

When his white-smocked, black-tied waiter comes, he orders a coffee (they have cappuccino, but there aren’t Starbucks on every corner yet and it still feels pretentious) and angel hair pasta with saffron and asparagus, and stays.

* * *

It takes Will longer to eat than it does for the woman in the raspberry beret to finish whatever she’s come for. At first he thought it might be an interview from the literal hat-in-hand stance, but she’s gone before his pasta arrives and interviews aren’t that fast. Not ones that end in a lightness of step and berry-glossed lips curved in an excited grin. For the first time, as the bubbled glass door opens to let her out, Will notices that she’s beautiful.

Part of him wants to follow, but there’s following a mystery and then there’s stalking. Admiring the insouciance of raspberry accessories with a navy coat in the face of a loss he can justify. Leaving an unfinished meal (that costs more than he’s ever spent on a single meal without a date to impress) on his stipend marks him the kind of fool he’s never been. And if she’s headed home, as he suspects from the certainty and purpose in her steps, then it’s crossing a line.

The saffron’s more delicate than the characteristic yellow leads people to believe. Will’s good at seeing what other people don’t, and what he sees in saffron is a history stretching back centuries, so deeply intertwined with other luxury trades that it symbolizes wealth, the exotic, Otherness. For Will, who eventually learned not to talk about his experiences with the Other, the monstrous Other, it’s tinged with the forbidden, the taboo. Or maybe it’s simpler than that: what’s a foster kid who fought his way off Ritalin doing eating angel hair and asparagus in a place like this?

It’s excellent, if a little too elegant for his palate, so Will finishes it, and a third cup of coffee. When he pays, he leaves a scrupulous twenty-percent tip. He waited tables at the Brown Jug at U of M to pay for books for his extra classes and firmly believes, if every human had to wait tables for six months before they turned twenty-one, there would be peace on earth. If he ever has kids, he’ll insist on the experience.

On his way out, hospital-proof rubber soles squeak-crunching on hard wood, Will gives in to his curiosity again. He stops where the woman stood and runs his finger up the brick. Sure enough, navy wool fibers in the exposed brick and one curly hair with enough root at the end to pull a DNA tag, but she’s not missing or murdered, just mysterious, and he’s not a Fed yet, so he leaves both where they are.

Where the busy-looking guy with the Semitic features, pierced eyebrow (a decade before that’s cool), and a pencil through a knot of ass-length seal brown hair stood talking to her, there’s a thin spiral-bound notebook on the counter. It’s open to a calendar page, and since no one seems to be paying him any mind, Will angles his body to lean against the brick, pulls his mini-recorder out and murmurs nonsense notes while his gaze scans the pages. The pen beside the notebook has four colors, black, green, red, and blue, but the green is clicked on. Probably the black and blue have been used up already, because despite the love of options, most people use the ‘normal’ colors first. From the pages, red’s obviously used for changes or highlighting.

There are only two notations in green. One is for today, four hours from now. It reads, “Colleen James.” The other is for Monday afternoon at two. It just reads, “Laura,” with a big looping cursive “L” that carries all the way back up into the “a”. Colleen James, Will remembers from the billboard on the way in, is the musician playing tonight. His mystery in the raspberry beret isn’t Colleen James.

Her name is Laura, and she’ll be playing next Monday. Will should be coming off rotation again on Sunday at midnight.

He’ll be here.

* * *

Midnight Sunday turns into Monday at five. He’s been home two hours and seventeen minutes, asleep for two hours and fourteen of them, when they call him back in; Bridget Cook in 205 is asking for him, just him, and she doesn’t have long to live. Will hauls himself upright from a bed that isn’t even sleep-rumpled he crashed so hard, grabs clothes for later, and is out the door again two hours and twenty-one minutes later.

“I saw something,” Bridget confides, when she wakes again to find him sitting by her bedside, half-asleep himself.

The lights in the room are low because everything hurts her eyes. They hardly focus anymore, her unusual blue-green eyes, and it makes it even sadder somehow, those vivid, haunting eyes in that young-old face with its freckles and paper-thin skin. Her I Love Lucy red hair has all fallen out from the chemo, but there’s a picture of her on the stand beside her bed with a girl who is probably her stepsister from how close they stand without actually touching. A stepsister who feels guilty now that Bridget’s dying and she’ll live to go to prom and the Ohio State Fair and college without her.

“Yeah?” Will says and it’s no effort to sound interested, but he takes her hand when she reaches for him and gives it a little squeeze. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. My eyes...it was a blur, a shadow...but it touched me and I felt...Will, I felt so peaceful.” She sounds peaceful and it brings tears to Will’s eyes. “Do you think maybe it was my angel?”

Will doesn’t believe in angels or demons, but he does believe in monsters. No one’s ever been able to drum that out of him, even if he’s learned not to talk about it anymore. Mostly. That’s why Bridget asked for him, he knows, because he never tells her she’s hallucinating from her meds when she tells him about the angel that’s been following her since she was twelve. Since right before she got diagnosed the first time.

“Tell me what you remember. Close your eyes and think back. Did you hear anything? Smell anything?”

Her voice gets fainter and slower while she talks and by the end, he has to lean all the way over to hear her at all. At the end, Bridget asks him to find her angel; he promises to try.

By eleven o’clock, Bridget’s gone and there’s no angel to save her, but Will hopes, maybe prays, that one came to take her away. He makes careful notes of what she told him and spends another hour after they clear her room searching for signs anyone or anything has been there that isn’t an orderly, doctor, or intern, and runs into the stepsister. Karen. She tells him how much she’s going to miss Bridget, but her eyes show more relief than anything. He listens, but his attention’s on the strange brush of sooty-dust against the wall by Bridget’s bed and two sets of four punctures in the plastic at the foot of the bed. More raven than angel, maybe, but he’s convinced she saw something.

“She knew you cared,” he tells Karen a polite lie, then excuses himself to an institutional but surprisingly comfortable employee lounge for a nap and a shower before his ‘lunchdate’ with his mystery.

* * *

  


It’s way too early for the jazz crowd when Will arrives, a little late for lunch, but it’s Club Isabella and, of course, they are still serving the young doctors, sir, if he’d like to dine. He wants to say no, he’s really too keyed up to eat. His stomach always gets fussy when he’s nervous or excited or wants something too much. Maybe he should just go, he thinks, but then he glances up and she’s there already, setting up on the stage, those dark chestnut curls wound around and through with a ribbon in raspberry red. He wants to know why, why raspberry, what does it mean, so he stays and orders from the dinner menu -- grilled muscovy duck breast with a blackberry and onion confit -- instead.

Duck doesn’t, he learns, taste like chicken, or like turkey. It’s richer than both, fattier, and he has no idea what a confit is or how it’s made, or why anyone would’ve thought to mix blackberries and onions, but somehow the combination works. Like raspberry and chestnut, a woman thirty-some years young and an old man’s jazz.

She plays a clarinet, and the only song he recognizes is ‘Begin the Beguine’, and that only because his mother had the Cole Porter record on the turntable when she died and he kept it, carrying it home to home until it broke. He still has the pieces, two large and one small and jagged. Someday, when he has a home, he’ll glue them together and put them on a Victorola. People will think he’s artsy and eccentric; only he’ll know he’s obsessed with puzzles, the greatest of which is his mother, and this puzzle-piece record stands for her. And, now, in a way, it stands for Laura, too.

Since he’s trying new things today, learning, expanding his forensic knowledge base he tells himself, Will asks for the waiter’s recommendation for a drink to go with the caramel flan. It has raspberries, but Laura’s ribbon has the superior color, nestled in the twists of her braid. The waiter suggests a tawny port. It’s sweeter than Will would usually like and seems pretentious, especially the fact it’s only a few years younger than him, but the flavor settles into something raisin-y and, the only word he has for it is, quiet.

Everything about the afternoon is quiet, like a warm early summer evening down on old River Road even though November is coming on and the ground when he arrived was dusted with snow. As afternoon shifts into evening, quiet becomes sweet, also. Rich. Filled with new flavors Will doesn’t yet know and normally wouldn’t care to learn, except that Laura and her clarinet and the fierce joy in tear-damp eyes are pulling him on. And they are tear-damp again, tonight, during her set break. Will notices, of course he does, and like the raspberry of the ribbon, the hastily rubbed pink of her eyes makes him want to inquire. He observes instead, blending away, seeing rather than being seen. It has always been safer that way.

She does see him though, when she’s cleaning out her clarinet, breaking it down to put in its case. A surprised smile lights her eyes but just barely touches her mouth.

On her way out, she pauses by his table. “You’ve been here all day.” Her voice has a raw, husky tenor to it he wouldn’t have expected but the words have the crisp, unaccented cadence of the Ohio Basin, the one taught to newscasters for being so bland you don’t notice it’s there at all, none of the Midwestern nasal twang most people would expect.

The lack of a distracting twang is, well, distracting, suggesting things about Laura Will thinks he might be interested to know. It takes him a few extra seconds to quirk a self-effacing smile and shrug a bit. “You’re very good.” That much he knows, even if he’s just guessing she hit most of the notes.

Instead of the, “I hope they thought so,” Will’s expecting - it was an audition, after all - she smiles that surprised smile again, surprised and Will wants to say fulfilled but he doesn’t know why. “Thank you,” she says and she’s moved on before he can tell her his name.

* * *

She plays Monday afternoons through November, and Will always manages to be there. Twice he can only get away for a late lunch and a few songs, but twice he comes before she begins and stays until she leaves. They never talk, but she always smiles, and on the Mondays he’s late, he tells himself she seems relieved when their eyes meet.

In December she moves to Sunday evenings and he’s free for all but one. The week before the one he’s going to have to miss, he sends her a glass of orange juice during her intermission and asks the cocktail waitress to say it’s from him. Laura glances up across the room, sees him and abruptly the tension in her shoulders fades away. He could’ve sent her a drink, one of her choice, but in the eight times he’s seen her play, nine times he’s seen her at all, Will has never seen her drink anything but water or orange juice. There’s a reason she doesn’t drink, it might go with the reason for the raspberry ribbon or the set-break tears she still sometimes gets in her eyes, but he still has never asked.

She comes to his table again, and her slow walk over gives him time to observe she’s done something new with her hair, maybe flat-ironed it. The curls are still there, but they’re tamer, more subdued; the ubiquitous raspberry ribbon loops loosely around the straightened mass that lies politely against her back. It could be winter, the drier air, but he thinks maybe it’s one of those woman things. A new boyfriend, a phase of hating her hair, feeling a little more polished with a little less curl, whatever it is, Will prefers it wild.

Laura’s still surprising him though, still a mystery, since she holds up the juice and asks, “Why?” If anything, the up-inflection is sharp, sounds a little betrayed.

“I won’t be here next week,” Will tells her. Why lie? That was the point of the juice after all, to get her attention and apologize. Even if he’s not sure why he feels like he should. They’ve never exchanged more than a few simple words. “I have to work.”

“Oh.” There’s a moment where he thinks maybe she’ll finally ask his name. It hangs between them, like a kiss about to close, but the gold that fires hazel eyes when she’s happy has transmuted into duller bronze today. Laura nods and sips the juice he wishes now were ruby red instead of orange. She says, “Okay,” but she’s lying. He can tell; she won’t meet his gaze before she walks away.

“Laura.”

Her steps falter. She doesn’t glance behind. The thick tail of straightened chestnut waves stays between her shoulders, rests against her gray angora sweater, square. Panic hits him. What will he say?

“Have a good week. I’ll see you a week from Saturday.” They’ve moved her back because the reviews have been exceptional.

Some of the tension fades from her next step. Her ponytail shifts; her hips think about swaying. “A week from Saturday,” she says, but he knows. It’s still not okay.

* * *

Saturday night around ten, in the middle of his shift in the morgue, Greer sticks her hand in the chest cavity of a gunshot victim - Danny Williams, age ten, victim of drug-related violence (back before Washington decided to fight a war on drugs and made it worse) - and Will almost hurls. He retches loudly, spinning away to the sink and stays there, dry-heaving for almost a minute. When he comes back flushed and apologizing, Greer arches an eyebrow at him across the corpse. Everyone knows he’s not a gorehound, but he’s never been that kind of squeamish before.

He gets progressively queasier, skin tone progressively closing in on the institutional green wall tiles, until just after three a.m. One of the tech knocks over a jar of formaldehyde. The scent hits Will somewhere between the lizard brain and the stomach and twenty seconds later, his shoes and the floor are Jackson Pollacked with the Cup O’ Noodles he forced down at midnight before spending the rest of his break on a gurney in the hall.

At seven a.m. (there are no living patients for him to infect and he doesn’t have a fever), Greer sends him home. The morgue is depressing enough without the extra dose of Lysol from cleaning up after him every two hours. By three in the afternoon, he’s had six cups of Lipton chicken soup, a sleeve of Saltines, and he’s seriously contemplating the Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese in his freezer. At eight, he gives in and eats it, after a shower. The cab picks him up at 9:17, Sunday night.

\-- _psychosomatic: of, relating to, involving, or concerned with, bodily symptoms caused by mental or emotional disturbance_ \--

Dark circles under his eyes get hidden behind gold wireframes and fade with each glass of water. Laura’s clarinet solos sound similarly bruised. There’s a new song, haunting, truly mournful, that he wants to hate for how much it hurts, but it’s so heartbreakingly beautiful - like a ray of sun through a stained glass window - he can’t do anything but love.

At set break, he catches her elbow on two fingers when she hurries past. “Laura.”

She stops in her tracks. “You’re here.” The note she hits breaks his heart even more than the song. He can’t decide if she sounds more like a kid whose dad finally showed up for the recital he’d been promising to attend or just touched, like a new girlfriend getting a surprise gift.

Will smiles, bruised eyes crinkling up at the corners and burning with a determined light. “I called in sick.”

Something unreadable flickers in her eyes - hurt, maybe, but it’s there and then gone so fast Will can’t tell, and, anyway, she replaces it with a bright smile on raspberry-glossed lips. He hasn’t seen that color for a few weeks and he’s missed it.

She rests her hand over his, almost as briefly as that tiny flicker before, a butterfly alighting for a charmed instant. “Thanks.”

Her second set has more lightness in it. ‘Begin the Beguin’ makes a reappearance, and ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’. He recognizes a few more songs because he’s been listening to jazz on his portable CD player, including ‘Stardust’, and he almost thinks she’s teasing him with ‘What’s it All About, Alfie?’ Whether it really has anything to do with him or not, the lightness, the set-selection, Will has no idea, but the smile she flashes him before she plays her last encore feels like a game-winning home run.

When he leaves tonight, she asks, “See you next Saturday?” and he answers, “Yeah.”

Laura still doesn’t know his name, but he thinks maybe he doesn’t need her to. Someday he’ll work up the nerve to ask why raspberry and solve his mystery, but for now, for tonight, they’re both okay.

* * *

Laura plays New Year’s Eve and, of course, he’s there. He has nowhere else to be, and maybe he’s hoping just a bit for that kiss at midnight when they swap over to recorded jazz for half an hour while the ball falls on Times Square. It doesn’t happen, neither does the dance he’d also hoped for, and practiced a little, so he wouldn’t step on her toes if he got the chance. She actually disappears for the canned half hour and she doesn’t play any encores.

They end up waiting for a cab together outside the Club. The wind blowing up Cornell has exchanged October’s promise of snow and hot chocolate for _Jesus Christ it’s cold_ or _colder than a witch’s tit_ depending on your preference in cursing and blasphemy. Will says neither, but watches the twin frosted plumes of their breath. Hers is shorter and it shouldn’t be; she plays a woodwind. A cold would explain why she’s been so subdued.

When the cabs roll up and carefully stop - it’s January and black ice is ubiquitous - Will wishes her a happy New Year. She lifts a raspberry-gloved hand to touch his cheek, the wool oddly soft against his chilled skin. “You, too, Will.”

His heart pounds, slamming staccato against his ribs as she slips into her cab. She knows. He promises himself he’ll ask about her color palette next week and wonders if she’s known all along.

* * *

The signboard outside Club Isabella bears a name he doesn’t recognize when he trudges up Cornell next Saturday night. His head’s down, ears tucked into his coat against the chill and glasses fogging from his breath, but he can tell Orly Taitz is a late substitution because the handwriting’s different, loopier. The ‘y’ continues beneath the ‘O’ and back up into it, backwards from the “L” in green pen that will always be how he sees Laura’s name in his head, but it’s clearly the same hand.

Will’s disappointed tonight won’t be when he learns the meaning of raspberry but not really surprised. He never sleeps well, more a legacy of Ritalin and memories of monsters than his residency schedule, but since New Year’s Eve, his dreams when he has them have been plagued with twin plumes of frozen breath, a circuit around a woman in a navy pea-coat with once-curly chestnut hair, and crimson accessories, dark crimson, the color of coughed-up blood.

He asks the manager, Levi of the four-click pen, just to be sure she hasn’t quit and moved on, but Levi says no. When Will presses him for details, Levi shrugs Taurean shoulders and answers, “Called in sick. That’s all I know.”

There’s a nasty strain of bacterial pneumonia going around this season. The hospital’s been full of it and Will’s been scrubbing his hands pink between one room and the next. The first few days mimic a cold. Maybe Laura’s come down with it; she wouldn’t miss a gig for less than bedrest.

Ask him why and Will can support it with a thousand details, from the second degree burn blisters on the fingers of her right hand the first week she moved to Sundays to the fact she introduces at least one of her own songs every set, even though she gives away her CDs when she has them. Everyone flirts with her, guys and girls; she smiles without reciprocating (one touch to his cheek one time on New Year’s Eve is significant to him, but it’s probably just a pat to her) but doesn’t wear a ring.

Laura’s life is her music. If she could be here, she would.

* * *

Orly’s name is permanent the next Saturday. The script matches the rest of the board, which has been redone in an all-over back slant, left hand. There’s a single splotch over the ‘O’ that bled the black ink, probably snowmelt, but the erasure of the top right of the ‘O’ makes it look a little like an unraveling ‘L’, and it feels... it feels like a heart without a beat.

There’s snow on the sidewalk, a clean white crust at the edges from an afternoon squall. A shovel rests beside the hammered metal door to the right, and Will’s feet crunch in the salt he’d usually try not to track in. Today, he wants to drag his feet across the stained dark oak floor, to scratch it, scrape it, leave marks in the finish, grab the shovel and push it ahead of him, steal the four-click pen, write Laura’s name and leave a mark.

It’s irrational, this anger, this fury that she’s been erased. What did he expect? That she’d play here forever in this trendy but tiny jazz club in Cleveland? That she’d be his mystery, his puzzle, his secret until _he’d_ moved on?

Will tells himself to handle it. Cool it, pull it together, calm down. He thinks he might be doing all right until Levi spots him, then his mouth curls into an uncharacteristic snarl and he’s stabbing forward through the doctors and their protégés waiting for tables, not caring what they think of him, not caring if he’s seen. He has to know.

“Where is she?” Will demands, voice sharp with a power Will doesn’t even know he owns. “Where has she gone?”

Levi just stares for a minute, so startled by this outburst from the mild-mannered, sweet-tempered, honestly just a dork of a ex-ballplayer barely grown into his scrubs, that his gaping mouth produces no words. Then his hand settles on Will’s shoulder and it’s Will’s turn to stare. He knows that touch, remembers it. _I’m sorry, Will. Your mother’s gone._

“No.” Levi still hasn’t said a word but Will’s got that one. Once, and again. “No.”

“I’m...so sorry, Will. We thought...” Levi’s still startled, eyes shocked wide and his pulse beats sharp sympathy in his throat. Will kind of wants to rip it out. “We just assumed you knew.”

“No,” he says again, but the word is hollow, the hand hasn’t left. He knows. “Not Laura.” No no no.

Psychosomasis. His emotions affect his body.

There are tears.

Levi hands him a small flyer. It’s pink, but not raspberry.

It’s customary to hear silence at these times, Will thinks. To feel numb. Will doesn’t. He sees a beret in manicured hands, glossed lips curved around a reed, a ribbon twined through vibrant curls. He hears, “You too, Will,” and the thrum of the one question he never asked.

When he opens his mouth again, ‘raspberry’ isn’t the word that comes out. It’s low and raspy, hoarse. “How?”

* * *

Cancer.

Will should have known.

Maybe he did.

* * *

“Oh my god, you’re here. You’re him!”

It’s the last thing Will expects to hear at a memorial service for a woman he loved but didn’t know.

A woman in a navy pea coat with a dark pink scarf and gloves comes barreling toward him, all smiles and edges and angles, despite the grief of this horrible gray Valentine’s day. She’s not Laura, but Will doesn’t doubt they were close. For a brief instant, a shaft of sunlight pierces the clouds; it catches on her dark curls and sunfire turns them chestnut.

Will’s heart clenches and leaves him in shards.

The woman hugs him and even though he’s not a hugger, he lets her. It’s too much work to push her away, and she’s determined, with inertia, gravity and raspberry on her side. His therapist would say he could use the contact anyway.

Will stares over her shoulder at his feet on the stairs of the Episcopal church in Chagrin Falls. He stares at the trees that won’t turn green for two more months. He stares at anything that will hold his attention, until she pulls back and shakes her head.

“Don’t be sad.”

There are tears in her blue eyes when she cocks her head to look deeper, at least, but Will has the feeling they’re not for Laura. He thinks, probably, they’re for him.

“Will,” she says, and he’s trying to listen, but suddenly all he hears is _You, too, Will_. She told this woman about him. Laura did.

He lifts his head, searching, needing to know: _what did she say?_

“You were important to her, you know.” It’s the same polite lie he told Bridget’s step-sister, inverted, and neither polite - there’s nothing polite about this energetic, bright-smiling woman - nor a lie. Why bother to find him, why pretend? Besides, Will’s studying to be a profiler; he’s a forensic psychiatrist. He would know.

 _You didn’t know about the cancer._

 _Maybe I did._

“You were the one life, Will,” the woman says, expectant. He should know what that means.

He catches his bottom lip in his teeth and tastes salt against his tongue; tears again. Past her, up the stairs, into the church, people rub their hands together against the cold, kiss chilled cheeks, talk about Laura. Grieve.

Will stands here and breathes.

The one life.

Every artist wants to touch one person. To change one life.

And Will was hers.

“Raspberry?” Will asks, but it’s ringing with crystal clarity already and the woman knows it. There’s nothing left for her to say.

She just nods, and from death to life, his mystery is solved.

* * *

A blast of early October wind swirls around his ankles, plastering them with damp newsprint and a discarded bag from tea. It promises nothing but one more year without answers, more days on a job in a city where he has no reason to stay. Meg’s moved out, the guys at the precinct call him ‘Sherlock’ to his face and ‘casebreaker’ behind his back, and even when he thinks he’s made some progress, like with the FBI in Austin, it goes and fades away.

Across the street, there’s movement, a shifting of shadows, a flash of terrified fishbelly pale against a thousand shades of grey. Will follows, and despite his shout, it - no, he, a boy - begins to climb. He spiders up the side of dark brown brick taking Will’s heart with him. “Hey!”

Seconds later, Will’s on the ground, staring up into the face of a woman, maybe ten years his senior. She wears a ridiculous black hat, something for grandmothers and funerals, but it’s the choker that snares his gaze. They were never meant to go together, that fussy hat and the thick, sensual band practically demanding he notice her throat. She’s apologizing for hitting him, but there’s a flash in blue eyes and a curve to a mouth that’s almost - but not quite - raspberry. She gives him a card, a riddle in parchment, an invitation, as to a ball.

What the hell, Will thinks when he stares in the mirror. She’s a mystery and Will’s been dying for years. He’s going to quit his job next week anyway, or the week after that.

He picks up the phone and he calls.


End file.
